Mount Suribachi
— — the small hill that history climbed.
Not only on a wall.
“A dormant volcanic cone rising at the southern tip of Iwo Jima, dark with basalt and salt-bleached scrub. From the summit the whole island falls away in a long pork-chop curve toward the sea. Most days nobody is there. The Japanese name, Suribachi-yama, means the grinding-bowl mountain, for the way the crater holds the wind. The hill is small as mountains go, but it carries the weight of February 23, 1945, and the photograph that travelled the world.
Mount Suribachi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Suribachi rises 169 metres (554 feet) at the southwestern tip of Iwo Jima, a volcanic island in the Ogasawara chain administered as part of Tokyo Metropolis, roughly 1,200 kilometres south of Tokyo. The island itself is the exposed summit of a much larger submarine volcano in the Izu-Bonin arc, and is still geologically active, with the seafloor around it rising several centimetres each year. Iwo Jima is officially known in Japanese as Iōtō, the older reading restored in 2007 by the Geographical Survey Institute.
Suribachi is built from layers of basaltic andesite, volcanic ash, and welded tuff, the dark grit that gives the slopes their colour and the beaches their famous black sand. The cone is laced with tunnels and caves cut by the Imperial Japanese Army before the 1945 battle, many of which remain sealed. The whole island sits on top of an active hydrothermal system; ground temperatures in places exceed 60 °C and steam vents still open without warning along the flanks of the mountain.
Iwo Jima is closed to general tourism. The island is administered by Japan's Ministry of Defense and used by the Japan Self-Defense Forces; access is restricted to memorial delegations, surviving veterans, bereaved families, and a small number of organised remembrance tours that visit by chartered aircraft from Tokyo. The Reunion of Honor monument, jointly raised by Japan and the United States in 1985, stands on the southern beach below Suribachi. Visitors who do reach the summit climb a short paved road built up the eastern flank.